Social Media Breakfast Madison | George B. Thokmas Speaking #speaker

Today we are going to talk about how to build an inbound marketing and content machine without blowing your budget. First of all, I guess I need to get a feel for the room. How many of you actually know what inbound marketing is? By a show of hands? Okay. And keep your hands up. Those of you that then know what content marketing is, go ahead and raise your hands. Now, how many of you in your company, in your business, or by yourself are actually using some type. You can put your hand down, sir. Everybody else did that. Okay. How many of you, by a show of hands, because we are going to raise them again, are using some type of marketing automation to do inbound or content marketing, raise them high. So not a lot. And I found in our industry, there's a couple reasons for that and we're going to talk about those. So first of all, you should probably get to know me a little bit. My name is George B. Thomas. The B is on purpose because George Thomas is a mathematician, that guy. I am not. But you can see by the logo, I work for a company called the Sales Line, AKA Marcus Sheridan, AKA the pool guy. And we go around the world and we talk about inbound marketing, content marketing, video marketing, podcasting, social media marketing. Man, we talk a lot. But we talk about these topics because they're important. For me, though, one of the major things I do is I am a HubSpot trainer. And what that means is there's a marketing Automation software called HubSpot by a show of hands. And then I swear I'm going to quit asking you to raise your hand because you're like, I don't need a workout this morning. I just had brought some pancakes. I might have to walk outside if I work out anymore. But by a show of hands, how many of you know what HubSpot is? Dang. So that's cool. So what I do is I train people how to use HubSpot for their inbound and content marketing. There are these little kind of icons here. These are certifications. HubSpot has 14 certifications that you can get if you are a partner for their company, which is or with their company. I have 13 of them. I'm also a HubSpot accredited trainer, one of about 40 people on the planet that hold that title. And all of that just means that I'm a really big nerd that has too much time to watch videos and get certifications. But it also makes me really qualified to teach people how to do inbound marketing and how to use HubSpot. If you want to tweet out. You can use eorgeb Thomas if I say something relatively smart or funny, which tends to happen sometimes when I talk. And if you really want to connect with me, you can go to Mr. GeorgeBThomas on the book of Faces, because that's where I like to jam out with live and video and all sorts of stuff. So that's a little bit about me as I've gone through this journey for about the last four or five years with HubSpot and educating and helping companies learn how to do this thing. With inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, I have found that there are two major problems that a lot of people are facing. The first one, like, you've got to be making some serious bank to be able to afford that. And I honestly feel like it's probably not many people in this room that could afford it. Now if you're sitting here and be like, george, that's how I roll, well, then talk to me afterwards and I'll sign you up for HubSpot and we'll teach you how to use that. We'll jam with it. But I think most people are looking for another opportunity. How can I actually do this? I understand the buyer's changed. I understand that I need to do business different. I understand that I need to become the Wikipedia of my space. Well, then you hire a coach and you realize that you have some people in house that can be your content manager or your videographer or your social media expert. You're willing to learn. You don't need somebody to do it for you. It's good. It's a little bit less if you do a coach and you do HubSpot anywhere from 50 to 60 some thousand dollars. Many of you are like, oh, yeah, we can do that. That's cool. Call the sales line. We'll hook you up, we'll coach you, we'll rock and roll. But I really think there's a larger portion of this audience that are like, no, no, still no, not for me. Which is fine. Is it for you? Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, so HubSpot and coaching. So you need a third option of what you can do. Now, what I want everybody to realize is for the rest of the talk, I am going to embrace my job title at the sales line, which is Inbound Jedi, which means I'm about to get real nerdy. And we're gonna get real tactical because this has kind of been the strategy or overarching cloud portion of what you need to understand so that we can Dive into the nitty gritty. Okay? You, if you decide to go this third route, are going to need to invest time and you're going to need to grow your talents in house to be able to pull this off. But I'm going to give you a roadmap of what needs to be in place. And I'm going to give you a set of tools that you could use that you will not blow your budget. Some of them are free, some of them are one time payments, and some of them are minimal monthly payments. How's that sound? Yeah. Does it sound like information you can use? Do you want to do business better? All right, so how do you build your own inbound marketing machine, by the way? You guys are getting good. It's getting exciting up in here. Here's the thing. There are many moving parts to an inbound machine. As you can see in this ring here we've got social media analytics, SEO automation, content lead, conversion, lead nurturing. These are all the buzzwords that you hear about things that we should be doing to do a digital business. Right. But when do we use each tool and what tools do we need? Well, we're gonna uncover that right now. This is the inbound marketing methodology. HubSpot actually came up with this. Just like you all knew, there was a buyer's journey and I shamingly called it crap. And it's not crap. And I'll probably get fired for that. Just kidding. This is something that us as marketers or business owners should follow where we understand that we have anonymous visitors or strangers out in the world. We bring them into visitors, convert them to leads and customers and promoters, and there's a track, convert, close and delight. Those are the stages that we're trying to push people through. This is literally the playing field of our game. This is the end zones. This is the 50 yard line. This is the out of bounds. And we should be paying attention to it as we think of these tools, as we think of how we're gonna use our website to do inbound and content marketing. So the first thing I'll start with is your content and your website. I'm just super curious. And let's do this one with maybe just some sound. Cause I like when you guys are like actually using your vocal cords. If you use WordPress for your website right now, say I I. Holy crap. That's a large portion of the room. Some of you are like nay, which is fine because if you use Joomla Drupal, Shopify, that's about it. You'll Find other ways that you can do this technology. The other thing is you may be sitting there with a website that is just pre baked like HTML or old school. You may want to look at this and go, who's the closest WordPress developer? Like, you may want to Google this and realize it may be time to change your website to something else. But in the rest of the talk, we're going to assume that people are using WordPress and we're going to build an all in one Software inside of WordPress. So the first thing that a lot of companies spend tons of money on is an agency to design and develop their website so that it actually is able to have like two columns or three columns or put that picture just perfect or do this additional functionality. And so the first piece, the first tool that I want to talk to you about is for your content, it is for your design, it is for your development. And it's actually called Visual Composer. And what it allows you to do, instead of having the default WordPress box, you kind of got to type and then maybe. Should I use tables? Oh, tables aren't responsive. I told you I was going to go nerdy. You can actually just have this builder right here and you can see that you can add rows and you can split rows and you can have single images and you can have copy. And it allows you to really set up your pages the way that you want to set them up. And instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a developer or designer, which by the way, if you're a developer or designer in the room, I apologize right now. You want to stand up and punch me in the face, I get it. I design and develop too. I've punched myself in the face for this part of the talk. But it also gives you a lot of functionality. So you can see here, you can do text blocks and icons and message boxes and all sorts of cool things with Visual Composer. And what's really neat about Visual Composer is this fact right here costs $34, one time fee. And so instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, you spend $34, you put it into your WordPress and now you can lay out the pages you want them to be laid out so people can educate themselves. There are other composers that you can use. I'm just simply using this one as an example. Beaver Builder might be another one as well. So once you get your website built the way you want it, once you have it laid out, you've kind of made your home capable and ready to invite people over, because trust Me, Some of you, your websites. It's like you've invited me to the party, but your underwear is still on the living room floor, which is kind of awkward. But, hey, it's your house. But you can get your house in order. And now when you invite people over, you usually have a guest list, and you need to say, hey, who's coming to the party? Who's actually showing up? And so you should be measuring everything that's happening on your website a couple different ways you can do this. You can go super nerdy, and you can use something like Google Analytics. It's a huge tool. It's massive. A lot of people don't understand it, but if you want to dive into it, you can. There's training courses on Lynda.com you can teach yourself. Remember, you have to invest time. You have to grow your talents. This is one place that you might have to do that. But there are definitely three things that you should be doing in Google Analytics. You should be seeing where people are coming from, like how many are down the street or how many are from India. Probably not selling to the ones in India or wherever, but we can see where they're from. The other thing is, you can definitely see if they're new versus returning. Right? Because you want to know if the content that you're creating, is it generating new people who are finding out about me, or the same people who just simply love me, like my mom, my uncle, and my sister, coming to visit my site all the time to see what I'm doing. But you can see that also, you should see how fast your pages are going. Google pays attention to how fast your page loads. If your page loads slow, you're not gonna rank as well on SEO. That's super nerdy. But pay attention to the page timings. Now you might be thinking, george, there's just absolutely no way Google Analytics is too big. I don't want to deal with that. That's fine. So big. It's so difficult to learn. It's free, so you're not spending a dime, but you can do a ton of stuff in there just by a quick show of hands. Who loves Google Analytics? Wow. Preaching to the choir. Good. If you didn't raise your hand and you're like, I just want something a little bit easier, you can actually have a Google Analytics account. And this is a plugin called Monster Insights. It'll pipe what is important to you into your WordPress portal. So you don't have to log into Google Analytics. You can just log into your WordPress portal. Remember, what I'm going to say is we're building an all in one. So here your analytics live inside of WordPress and it's one login and you can see the stats. If you're like, nope, I don't even want to sign up for Google Analytics. Google is the devil. Well, there's psychiatrists for that, but there also is. And by the way, that's free or $89 a month for that plugin. But there is also a plugin that you can call it Slim Stats and it brings in a ton of analytics that you can look at. You can see here on the screen, probably in the back. It's hard, but recent search terms, top web pages, top referring domains, top search terms, traffic at a glance. You've got some nice little, you know, page views up here. And so you can really just log into WordPress, see what's kind of happening. It's called Slim Stats. What's nice about Slim Stats is it's free or you can buy a bundle that'll take it even to the next level for about $181 time cost. Slim Stats. Yep. So we've talked about, let's go back here. We've talked about getting your house organized. We've talked about measuring because we should be measuring things, right? There's a bunch of different ways. Now how do you get people to come to your house? And I feel like I'm going to be preaching to the choir because there is a lot of Google Analytics nerds in the room. But I'm going to do it again. There is things that you should be paying attention to, which is keywords. Obviously Ahrefs helps you do that. Ahrefs will allow you to run reports on websites, competitor websites, certain keyword phrases. By the way, we gave away a book. Well, I didn't, but you know, Dream Bank. Did they ask, you answer. We have actually started teaching our clients that we are in the time the realm of keyword questions. Instead of just keywords or long tail keywords. Because think about you and your user experience with Google or Siri or Alexa. You simply always ask them a question. Think about it. And so if your content is question based and your philosophy is question based on they ask, you answer, then you go to question keywords or keyword questions. But you can see you can run some awesome reports, you can run competitive domains, you can look at what they're writing, what you should be writing and that will help you generate the traffic to your site because you'll know what content to create $99 or $1,000. This is one of the most expensive tools I actually talk about. You really only need the $99 version because the thousand dollar version is if you're an agency and you've got like 20 sites or whatever that you want to plug into it, that is called Ahrefs a href. So the other tool that I absolutely Love inside of WordPress is SEO Yoast. SEO Yoast. Anybody use Yoast? Yes. If you're not raising your hand and you have a WordPress site, this is the first plugin you should install when you get back to your office. What this allows you to do is set a focus keyword for that article or for that page. It allows you to customize your title and your meta description, which is the thing that people see on the SERPs or search engine results page when they are asking that question around your products or services. And you can make it customized and teasable. But. But you're also gonna be able to see that Yoast will show you a bad example. Right? And how do you know this is a bad example? Because it says so on the page. Winner. Yes, because it says so on the page. But also because you have red dots and orange dots and it's giving you the things that you need to do. Look, a lot of us are not SEO experts, but if something tells us, hey, you're missing an alt text, you're missing the keyword in the title, you're missing the keyword in the meta description, you're missing the keyword here, there and everywhere, then this is what you want to use. Because this is a good example. Anybody know why this is a good example? Because it says so on the page. He already told us no, because it's all green, right? There's only one little red area that we didn't fix and that's on keyword density. I could go really nerdy on that, but I'm not going to. But SEO Yoast and that you can even optimize readability. That is free or $69. Now, the number one question I usually get during this talk is, George, why is SEO Yoast free? And what's the difference between the $69 version, $69 version. You get video tutorials that come with it. There's like not enough functionality difference than the free version for you really probably to worry about it. But if you want tutorials to really know how to use the tool, then get the paid version. So we got a good looking site. We're measuring results we're bringing people to the, to the website because we are using keywords, we're focused on answering questions, we're doing, you answer. Now it comes about converting those people into leads, forms, call to actions, landing pages, thank you, Pages. And natively, WordPress does not have that functionality. Right? You can do pages and you can do blog posts and that's about it. But we're going to talk about two different pieces of software that you could use. The first one is Mautic. I have to ask this, how many of you know what Mautic is in the room? So that's super interesting to me. There are three people, two of which listen to my podcast, so I know why they know what Mautic is. And so mautic is a 100% free, open source marketing automation platform. Imagine that somebody said, hey, we're just going to make HubSpot free, or we're going to make Marketo free, or imagine they are the marketing automation software that is like WordPress where there used to be a day where CMSs were expensive and you had to have a custom CMS and WordPress is like, no, no, no, no, no. We're just gonna make that free. That's what Mautic does. But inside of Mautic, and again, I apologize in the back, it's hard to see. You can see that you can build forms and you can have different forms here and you can even have categories for your forms. You can, you're also gonna be able to see in Mautic that they have some templates that you can build and you can even do a code mode or build your own custom landing pages here. And you got room for title and different things like that. And also you're gonna be able to do AB testing and you're gonna see that there's reporting inside of Mautic. Now, did I happen to mention that that was free, by the way? It's free. Yeah. And we're not done talking about Mautic yet, but we'll come back to that in a minute. I always love that moment where like people are like, oh my gosh, it's free. All right, this is Inbound now. Inbound now is a plugin. Again, Mautic is outside of WordPress, right? So I wanted to give you an option where it's inside of WordPress. Remember, one login and all in one software. This is Inbound now what it allows you to do is do the same thing where you have forms. These are customizable forms. It is very easy to Map the forms to drag and drop the forms. You can see that you can manage the form settings, edit the fields, or even work on design layout. Right here inside of WordPress, you can see that you can do landing pages. You can also see right here. Look at that, that's an A. That's a little hint. But you can see total visits, total conversions and the conversion rate right inside of WordPress. And here's where the tease is gone. You can also do AB testing so you can a b test your landing pages. And what's really nice is they even have a call to Actions tool. And so you can have call to actions at the end of your blog in your sidebar, whatever. And you can also AB test those and see impressions, conversions and total click through rate right inside of WordPress. Now you're like, oh, this is probably going to be one of those like expensive tools. He already gave us some free ones. This one is free or $45 a month. But I will tell you, if you are a single company only needing to put it on one site, you just need to purchase the $10 a month plan. So 10 bucks a month, landing pages, a B testing metrics, call to actions inside of WordPress. Mind blown, right? All right, so once you have these conversion points built out, you're going to be generating what we call contacts. Hopefully these contacts become customers. But we need to make sure that we're doing a couple things with these customers. We need to be doing some lead nurturing, we need to be doing some list segmentation. And so we just don't want to want a big bucket that we can pour these people into. We want to be able to do this the right way. And so again, in Mautic, you can see here they have what's called segments, which is your list segmentation or your database segmentation. You want to be able to use something like this. So if you wanted to, I don't know, market to dairy farmers in Nebraska who like purple shoes, you have that list. I love when I get giggles with that list because that's the dumbest list ever. Like, first of all, dairy farmers don't wear purple tennis shoes. They wear galoshes because, like, it's just messy. But anyway, you can also see here in Mautic where you can pull in information, right? First name, last name, city, state. You can also see right here, this is a little hint. You can see that guy, a handsome guy right there. But you can also see that you can do lead scoring inside of Mautic. So everything on your website, every conversion that they make could be worth points. And you could say, hey, I want to see the people who have scored 50 points or 75 points going through my marketing. Why is that important? Because then, you know, if they're engaged with your brand or if they just happen to come and read your stuff and are only informed by the way, I'm going to give you a super secret tip. If you want to do something that's really cool with metrics, do page views. And you'll understand that the amount of page views people view, 10, 20, 40, is the amount they're informed about what you do. If you do lead scoring and break it into lists of 25, 50, 75, that's how engaged they are with your marketing. And so at the day, you could say, hey, I want dairy farmers in Nebraska who wear purple shoes that have seen 30 pages of my website and have a HubSpot score of 50. That's who I want to market to. Because they're informed, engaged, and they're the right Persona when they actually fill out a form. Are you talking about the end user or us? End user. They don't have to be logged in. We drop a cookie and not. When I say we, I don't mean we me. I mean you and your website will drop a cookie on their browser when they fill out a form. And that's when we can start to get this information. They won't ever see this information, but we'll get this information. Does that answer the question? Beautiful. So you also see here in Mautic that you can do notes. You'll see their social, you'll see things about them, their history again. You can see who they are. And look at this metrics, okay? Cost is free. Remember we already said that. Mautic free, okay, Inbound, now we have leads. We've got our leads lists here, right? So we can do our segmentation, we can create new lists, we've even got popular lists so we can see who the most people are coming into. We get to see a nice picture of them. We get to see any information that they filled out. We can see activity, conversion rate all inside of our HubSpot portal. We can also see what we call lead intelligence. So form submissions, page views, comments, CTA clicks, we see it all right here. By the way, if your sales folks don't have lead intelligence right now, this is something that immediately, once you get it up and running, once you get people converting, once you start to see this filling out, you want to have a conversation with your sales team and be like, by the way, I know we sell 17 different products, but before you get on the call with John Smith tomorrow, go ahead and look at their lead intelligence area. You'll see what blog articles they've been reading, you'll see what pages they've looked at, and you'll realize that they're interested in the orange widget, not the rest of them. Sales guys will hug you, they'll make the sale and they'll go do what they do best, which is golf. All right, cost free and 45. We already talked about this. So those are the tools that I want to cover today because those are the most important ones. We have to make our site look good. We have to measure everything. We have to focus on the questions that people are asking. We need to be able to give them a position where they can convert and then we need to be able to segment those contacts so we can know, nurture them down the buyer's journey and through our sales and marketing funnel. Everybody agree? Beautiful. So let's talk about some success stories. This guy right here, Smarter Finance usa. This is Rob Mishaloff. Rob Mishaloff is that solopreneur that I told you about at the very beginning who decided, hey, I'm going to go with HubSpot. It's very expensive, but I believe in this inbound marketing, this content marketing thing. He also came to the sales line and so we did consulting with him and we ran him through the things that he should be creating as far as content and building his site out. He wrote this blog article, how much does commercial LED lighting financing cost? Do you think this thing went viral? I mean, this post is the jam. No, as a matter of fact, it didn't. And it didn't really get read that much either. So why am I pointing out that he created this piece of content? Well, I'm going to read this. This is an email I got from Rob and it says, here's the LED lighting article we discussed. One of my lowest in terms of traffic with only 71 views since it was written, but turning into one of the most successful in terms of revenue. An LED manufacturing company was one of those views and we have been working with them to help their customers get financing. Deals just started coming over from them a week ago, but in that week we've been sent six customers asking for total financing of $535,865. Anybody agree? That's a lot of money. That's also more money than we said needed to be budgeted for. HubSpot and coaching by a little bit, tiny bit. Anyway, two of which have already been booked for over $100,000, roughly 6,500 in revenues. As the relationship progresses, the. The opportunity is there for this vendor to represent 20,000 per month in terms of revenue to Smarter Finance USA. Rob so we build a website, we give people a place to convert, we measure everything we're doing, we create content, and all of a sudden we're actually able to drive revenue. One out of the 71 views. I think anybody in this room can get that type of success. The next one. And, oh, by the way, this is Rob's traffic. When he started doing they ask, you answer, and when we started teaching him the big five, those are the two philosophies that we see. Well, two of the major philosophies that we teach at the sales line, that's his organic traffic, the green bars. So here's the next success story. Key Community management. They are an HOA company in North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina, which, by the way, is where I live. And they came to us and they said, man, we've got this site and it is jacked up like it's old, and nobody wants to talk to us, and we're not sure what we're gonna do. And so we did this thing that we just talked about this morning. We built them a new site. We put the right words on the pages. We gave people ways that they can convert who we help, just get a quote. And we started to build this inbound marketing machine. They had very little budget, very little budget. Within the first six months, they were on Google Maps area right here, which they had dreamed about getting to that point because that point is ads, map and then search results. Within that same six months, they also ended up doing this, having two different articles on the first page of results. When you type in HOA Management Companies, Charlotte, North Carolina. This dramatically changed the amount of people that talked to them and who wanted to talk to them. So I believe everybody in this room can spend the amount of money that we talked about this morning, and everybody in this room can get the results that we've been able to see this morning as well. So with that information, folks, I just want you to go forth. I want you to become an inbound marketing hero and rock out the world. You can see that. You can do landing pages. You can also see right here. Look at that. That's an A. That's a little hint. But you can see total visits, total conversions, and the conversion rate right inside of WordPress. And here's where the tease is gone. You can also do AB testing so you can a b test your landing pages. And what's really nice is they even have a Call to Actions tool. And so you can have Call to Actions at the end of your blog, in your sidebar, whatever. And you can also ab test those and see impressions, conversions and total click through rate. Right inside of WordPress. Now you're like, oh, this is probably gonna be one of those like expensive tools. He already gave us some free ones. This one is free or $45 a month. But I will tell you, if you are a single company only needing to put it on one site, you just need to purchase the $10 a month plan. So 10 bucks a month landing pages, AB testing metrics. Call to actions inside of WordPress mind blown, right? All right, so once you have these conversion points built out, you're going to be generating what we call contacts. Hopefully these contacts become customers. But we need to make sure that we're doing a couple things with these customers. We need to be doing some lead nurturing, we need to be doing some list segmentation. And so we just don't want to want a big bucket that we can pour these people into. We want to be able to do this the right way. And so again in mautic, you can see here they have what's called segments, which is your list segmentation or your database segmentation.